'It is more expensive for a business to have a sick worker present than to have a sick worker stay home.'

Her team looked at the health and well-being of nearly 18,000 U.S. workers and found that those without paid sick leave have significantly higher levels of psychological distress.

“And we further analyzed that to see that they reported that that psychological distress impacted them a lot,’” says Stoddard-Dare.

She says 'a lot' means people feel, "nervous, restless, fidgety, hopeless -- that everything was an effort, worthless” and really sad a lot of the time.

The study is the first to show a link between lack of paid sick leave and psychological distress.

The high costs of coming to work when sickStoddard-Dare says it’s part of a growing body of research showing how this basic benefit impacts workers and society as a whole. The most obvious example, she says, is that employees who don’t have paid sick leave are more likely to go to work when they’re sick.

“Which sounds like a ‘duh’ finding, but no-one had actually analyzed that before,” she says.

The implications, though, are way beyond 'duh.'

Stoddard-Dare says during the 2009 flu pandemic, people who came to work sick because they lacked paid leave infected a further 7 million co-workers. Some 1,500 people died because of that exposure.

“And the cost of presenteeism in the United States is in the billions every year,” she says, with estimates in the range of nearly $230 billion.

The data, says Stoddard-Dare, is conclusive in showing that "it is more expensive for a business to have a sick worker present than to have a sick worker stay home.”

The politics of paid sick leaveIn 2012, Connecticut became the first state to mandate paid sick leave. Businesses, especially in the restaurant and retail sectors fought the measure. But 18 months later, a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research showed that their opposition had evaporated because of the lack of negative effects.

For the health of the future workforceJinnett says employers who don’t offer paid sick leave accept higher worker turnover as part of the cost of doing business. Others, she says, find it better to tend to employees’ health needs.

“I do think that we’ll continue to see employers continue to go into those two camps.”

“If we look at it as a whole," she says, "it should be the interest of society that people have long, healthy working lives.”

Ohio lawmakers last year inserted an amendment into a bill that preemptively blocks cities from mandating paid sick leave, among other worker benefits. A judge in Cleveland on Friday ruled that the measure is unconstitutional.

The state has promised to appeal.

However, new research from Cleveland State could get them to rethink the costs of blocking this benefit.